In a piece I have, there is a tempo change in the middle of a bar. I added a dashed bar line so that it would be clear to players when the new tempo begins.
Dorico inserted a hidden 4/4(q 1+1+1+1) meter change. I guess it is considering it a new bar, but also it didn’t change the numbering, so there are two bars #2, and the bars match the numbering before the dashed change. I hadn’t really paid attention to those details; the meter showed what I wanted, and the bar numbers remained what I wanted, so great.
Now the proofreader issues two complaints: that the bar length is shorter than implied by the time signature (for bar 2, though technically there seem to be two bars #2), and that a double bar might make it more readable. I can ignore those as false positives, of course, but now I wonder what other problems the short bar(s) might cause down the road and if there is a better way to handle this? Or maybe I’m just overly concerned…
Obviously it would be better just to make two 2/4 bars, but it was published long ago like this and I can’t change the meter and bar numbers at this point. I can’t use an aggregate meter to get automatic dashed lines unless there’s some way I unware of to get that to display as 4/4 rather than 2/4 + 2/4.